A Crown of Lights (41 page)

‘Symbolic,’ a voice said from behind him. He turned and saw Vivvie on the step. Vivvie had come out to help him. Vivvie alone.

The worst thing that could’ve happened.

‘Symbolic of the whole struggle to free this country from two millennia of religious corruption and spiritual stagnation. He’s right, Betty. We have to play our part. We have to reconsecrate the church and it has to be tomorrow night. It’s why we’re here.’

Betty started to shake her head, and the light from the bulkhead caught one side of her face and Robin saw the dark smudges, saw she’d been crying hard.

‘Bets!’ He almost screamed. ‘Look, I know things haven’t been right. I know you never connected with this place. Honey, please... once this is over we’ll sell up, yeah? I mean, like, Jeez, from what I’ve been hearing there’s gotta be about a hundred
pagans ready to take it off our hands. But this... Imbolc... this is something we have to go through – together, yeah? Please let it be together.’

‘Give me those keys.’

‘I will not let you leave!’

‘You will not stop me,’ Betty said. ‘And
she
certainly won’t.’

She turned away, walked across the yard toward the track.

Robin ran after her, managed four paces before the cold, suddenly intense, bit into his chest and his breathing seemed to seize up. But that was nothing to the pain right dead centre of his heart chakra.

His eyes flooded up.

‘Don’t follow me,’ Betty said. ‘I mean it, don’t take one more pace.’

‘Y
OU
’
RE BACK HOME
?’ Eileen Cullen’s relief was apparent, even over hospital corridor echo and clattering trays.

Merrily switched on the engine, turned the heater up all the way and shook a cigarette into her lap. ‘I’m in my car on a pub car park in Old Hindwell, and wet and cold.’

‘You’re still
out
there? Oh hey, one of the porters saw you on the box tonight, said he fancied the hell out of you. Listen, you’ve heard about Buckingham? The car in the reservoir?’

‘It doesn’t mean she’s dead, Eileen.’

‘It’s scary, Merrily. Civilized woman like that, if she wanted to do away with herself, why not a bottle of Scotch and a handful of pills?’

‘I still can’t believe she has.’

‘Aye, well, sometimes you...’ Cullen hesitated. ‘Sometimes there’s things you just don’t want to believe, no matter what. What are the alternatives, after all? It’s suicide, face it. And don’t you go feeling guilty. There’s nothing you could’ve done.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because, Reverend, that’s the official motto of the National Health Service. Listen, will you be in town tomorrow?’

‘Probably not tomorrow.’

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Are we not talking now?’

‘What I want to talk about, you don’t on the phone. Well you
don’t at all if you’ve got any sense. I could come and see you... at your home.’

‘Eileen?’ Jane was right; Cullen, hard as a hospital potato, had never sounded less assured.

‘Truth is... I’ve not been frank with you, Merrily – or with meself, come to that. There’s things I ought to’ve said.’ She dropped her voice to just above a whisper. ‘About the night Menna Weal died. And I can’t talk here, I’m on the public phone.’

‘You’ve got an office, haven’t you?’

‘It’s open house in there, so it is. Anyway, I
won’t
talk in this place, and I don’t get off now until the morning. You’ve got my home number, so call me when you can.’

‘Eileen, don’t... do
not
hang up. Let’s just talk about Menna, OK? The stroke could have been brought on by stress, right? Severe emotional stress?’

‘Hypertension due to emotional trauma. Distended arteries, then a clot gets shunted into the brain. What kind of trauma you thinking about?’

‘Exorcism,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh, terrific,’ Cullen said drably.

‘The expulsion of an evil entity.
Intended
expulsion.’

‘I know what it
is
, I was raised a Catholic. But, excuse me, Reverend, would not someone in your job be seeing it everywhere you bloody look?’

‘Just... bear with me, OK? You get some ministers – of an evangelical or charismatic persuasion – who believe that demonic forces... and angelic forces, come to that... are all around us in all kinds of guises. Like there are probably a few in California who’d offer to exorcize me in order to expel the demon nicotine.’

‘You mean eejits.’

‘So here’s poor Menna – withdrawn, maladjusted maybe, communication problems. OK, I won’t go into details, but there’s good reason to think she was abused by her dad.’

‘Is that a fact,’ said Cullen, who’d heard it all many times before.

‘Probably over a long period. But not necessarily when she was a kid.’

‘So you could be talking about more of an unnatural
relationship
.’

‘If she was as naive and immature as I’ve been told, I think we’re still talking about abuse.’

Merrily lit another cigarette and gathered her thoughts, staring out along the village street. From here, she could count candles in nine separate windows. The street lighting was so meagre and widely spaced that some of the candles seemed disproportionately bright through the rain-blobbed windscreen and unintentionally jolly, like Christmas lights.

She just wanted to air this stuff, to another woman.

‘I don’t want to speculate too much about the state of the Weal marriage... but it seems likely the obsessive love there was fairly one-sided. And Weal must have realized that – that the father was still very much in the background, even though dead.’

‘You mean Weal’s thinking he might be having a happier time altogether if he can remove whatever emotional block’s been left behind in Menna by her having a sex beast for a father.’

‘I doubt the concept of happiness means much to him, but yeah... And he wouldn’t have her seeing a psychiatrist or a therapist because that’s not the kind of thing you’re seen to do in Old Hindwell. So, after a lot of agonizing and soul-searching, perhaps, he goes to the priest.’

‘Who you say’s not your regular kind of priest, yeah?’

‘Mmm. At the funeral, Ellis disclosed that Weal and Menna were baptized
together
, not long before she died. I think
that
means she was exorcized. Historically, baptism’s always been linked with exorcism. In the medieval Church, it was more or less believed that until it was baptized, a baby was the property of the Devil and if it died before baptism it would be consigned to the fires of hell.’

‘No offence to you, personally,’ Cullen said, ‘but how I hate the Church.’

‘So, suppose Weal believed that having Menna rebaptized into the faith would free her from the influence of her father... from the effects of her childhood. And suppose the ceremony – conducted in the privacy of their home – involved... well, something considerably more stressful than a sprinkling of holy water. And I
mean
more stressful.’

‘Then, sure, you
could
be into stroke country.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘And...’ Cullen hesitated, ‘as you’ve mentioned baptism, the anointing of the forehead with water, if we cast our minds back to a certain wee side ward...’

‘Mmm.’

‘I always thought any anointing of a corpse was down to the priest.’

‘Me, too.’

Long silence.

‘Possession is nine points of the law,’ Merrily said. ‘That was what Barbara Buckingham said.’

‘Possession?’ Cullen said.

‘Possession of the dead by the living, was how she put it, ostensibly meaning the private tomb. But I think there were other things she wasn’t prepared to put into words, maybe even to herself.’

‘Ah, Merrily...’

‘Pretty much like you, really. Why don’t you just tell me the rest?’

Cullen said, ‘This is a pressure job, you know? You get overtired, so you do.’

‘And imagine things.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Like?’

‘Like things you don’t believe in.’

‘Did something happen when you went down to the morgue?’

Cullen sighed. ‘Maybe.’

‘He went along with you – which is not usual.’

‘Not only that, he sent the porters away. He asked could he spend some time with her, say his goodbyes.’

‘How long?’

‘A clear hour. To cut a long story short, they sent for me, in the end, to exercise my fabled diplomacy on the man. When I get down there, I’m delighted to see he’s finally leaving. Has on his hat and coat, a big dark solicitor’s overcoat, like he’s on his way to court. I didn’t approach him, but I thought it was as well to follow him, to make quite sure he left the premises. So I did that. I followed him.’

Cullen broke off. There was the sound of someone calling from a distance, then Cullen said, ‘Two minutes, Josie, all right?’

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t stop now.’

‘Ach, normal way of things you wouldn’t get this out of me with thumbscrews. All right. Weal goes out by one of the back doors near the consultants’ car park. You can get across the yard there to the temporary visitors’ car park. It’s the quickest way, if you don’t mind there being no lights. Which I wish to God there had’ve been, then I could’ve said it was a reflection.’

Merrily revved the engine to blow more heat into the Volvo.

‘I could still say it was,’ Cullen said defiantly. ‘I can say any damn thing I want to, as I’m an atheist. I do not believe in God, I do not believe in angels or demons.’

‘And you don’t believe what you saw. A lot of people say that. That’s OK.’

‘Feel free to be patronizing, Reverend. I’ve woken up about seven times in the night since then. Gets into me fockin’ dreams, the way you get a virus in your computer. And everything freezes on you.’

‘I know.’

‘Oh,
you
know everything, so you do!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m standing in the doorway, just the other side of the big plastic doors, and I’m watching him walk across to the visitors’ car park, which is all but empty now. Nobody about but him and this... Jesus.’

Merrily’s eyes turned this way and that, determinedly counting nine candles in nine windows, banishing all wildly
flickering thoughts of the old rectory garden, while Cullen kept her waiting.

Until, at last, over the sound of footsteps in the hospital corridor and a woman squealing, she whispered, ‘Just a hovering thing, you know? Like a light. Not a bright light... more kind of greyish, half there and half not. That’s as best as I can tell you. You could see it and then you couldn’t. But you knew... you bloody
knew
. I went very cold, Merrily.
Very
cold, you know?’

‘Mmm.’

‘And him... Oh, he knew it was there, all right. I swear to God he knew it was there. Twice, he looked back over his shoulder. I... Aw, hell, I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud. It made me go cold, you know?’

‘I
do
know,’ Merrily said.

G
OMER WAS STANDING
up at the bar with Greg Starkey, talking to him between other customers buying drinks. Greg glanced at Merrily through bloodshot eyes, trying to keep his voice muted, not succeeding.

‘I’m on eggshells, trying to run a boozer, while she’s up inna bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space. If I put a hand on her it’s like I’ve hit her, you know? Like she got no skin? That’s what it does to them, is it? A blessing?’

A
blessing
? ‘How much did she tell you about it?’ Merrily asked.

‘Not a lot. I fought it was all gonna be “Praise the Lord” and that. I was geared up for that. Woulda been better than the battered wife routine. Who’s that bastard fink he is?’

‘Thinks he’s St Michael,’ Merrily said soberly. ‘Greg, do you think she’d talk to
me?
’

‘I just told Gomer I’ll put it to her. Soon’s I get a minute, which could be closing time. How long you got?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘I’ll do what I can.
Yes
, sir... Carlsberg, is that?’

Merrily beckoned Gomer back to the cold place nobody else wanted, near the door. She told him what she’d discussed with Eileen Cullen, about the reasons they figured J.W. Weal might have wanted Menna cleansed.

Gomer said shrewdly, ‘You reckon Barbara Thomas knew?’

‘About the baptism? It’s possible, isn’t it?’

The steamy light pooled in Gomer’s glasses. ‘Likely what Barbara Thomas found out got her killed then, ennit?’

‘Good God, Gomer!’

Gomer sniffed. ‘Reckoned I’d say it ’fore you did. Mind your back, vicar.’

A young woman had come in alone. She stood on the mat, shaking back wild, corn-coloured hair that somehow looked not only out of place in Old Hindwell, but out of season. She drew a breath, scanned the crowd in the bar and then walked through.

‘Until there’s a body,’ Merrily said, ‘she hasn’t been killed. Until there’s a body she isn’t dead.’

‘Who you got lined up for it, then? Big Weal ’isself?’

‘Shhhh!’

Gomer looked around, unconcerned. ‘He en’t yere.’

‘OK,’ Merrily whispered, ‘considered objectively, it seems ridiculous. I mean, if Barbara found out Weal arranged to have his wife exorcized by Ellis, as some kind of primitive pyschological therapy... well, he might not want that out in the open, but it’s only slightly dirty washing. And it
is
Christianity, of a sort. It’s no reason to kill somebody. And would he really expect to get away with it in a place like this?’

Gomer threw up his hands. ‘Place like
this
? Nowhere bloody easier, vicar! Local people protects local people. Might keep any number o’ secrets from each other, but if they gets a threat from Off, they’ll close in real tight till it’s over and gone. They thought J.W. Weal
had
done it, they’d be happy to shovel shit over his tracks, ennit?’

‘The other thing that struck me,’ Merrily said, ‘is that the doctor who kept prescribing all that oestrogen that sent Menna’s blood pressure up...’

‘Dr Coll, eh? Now
there’s
a respected man.’